


Dynamics of Combustion

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Case Fic, Gen, Lestrade-centric, Moriarty elements, Moriarty is more complicated than you thought!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-03
Updated: 2015-08-03
Packaged: 2018-04-12 16:41:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4486971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is sort of case-fic. It's sort of Moriarty fic. It's sort of backstory fic.</p><p>One of the traditions of Sherlock fandom is that Moriarty was originally Sherlock's tutor. This plays with that tradition more than a little. It also tries to use the game as a way of exploring the Holmes Family when Sherlock and Mycroft were little...and make some sense of Mummy's odd career choices and timing. For the record, just going by the apparent design-era of her book, it really looks to me like Mummy quit a good deal later than "to have children." So the postulate is that she actually quits rather later in the game than her own confession would suggest.</p><p>Anyway. Have fun. Hope you like it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dynamics of Combustion

Lestrade met Jacob Sextant at one of the many little celebrations various companies and organizations threw to honor Sherlock Holmes. In this case, the event was thrown by the Flandry School—a small public boys’ school known for feeding young men into more exclusive institutes, such as Eton and Harrow. The fete was entirely too twee and bubbly…but, then, apparently Flandry had been Sherlock’s first formal educational venue, as well as his having recently resolved a small difficulty for them. They were claiming double rights to praise their well-known alumnus.

“Not that dear Will is actually an alumnus, in the most rigorous sense,” the little Irishman said, primly. “As I recall, Mummy was able to blackmail and bribe them into keeping him for two entire years, but not so much as a semester beyond that. Here, Inspector—allow me to pour you some more of this good scotch the Head keeps hidden in this niche just for events like this. No, no—serves him right for economizing. The least I can do is make sure the more honorable guests are properly treated.”

He was a little man—dark eyed, sleek, chipper. Lestrade figured him as perhaps sixty. He was trapped between fascination—this was a man who’d apparently actually taught Sherlock as a boy!—and distaste. There was something sly and clever and bitchy about the man, who clearly saw Sherlock and his mother through the opposite of rose-tinted glasses. There was a serpent-green envy and resentment in his little, harsh revelations.

And, yet…the scotch was substantially better than that offered the rest of the company. And the man dropped hints of knowing still more about Sherlock’s boyhood. How could Lestrade, copper and detective and spy that he was, resist?

“So—you were here when Sherlock started school, then?” he said, sipping appreciatively at the tumbler of scotch. 

“No, no. I came later,” Sextant said, with a prim smile. 

“But I thought you said you’d taught Sherlock?”

“Oh, I did.” Sextant smirked, and glanced across the room. “Part of why I was hired, in fact. I’d survied three whole years as private tutor to Will…to Sherlock. Flandry brought me in the last year they had him, before they gave up outright. They hoped I might succeed where their own people didn’t. But, well…. They kept me on after, though, and I assure you I deserved it.”

“And you’re working here still,” Lestrade said, stalling for time as he considered what Sextant had said.

“That’s rather a loaded question,” Sextant said with that prim, smug little smile… “Officially, of course, I’ve taken honorable retirement, with a pension supplemented by funds raised by former students. Unofficially, well—I’m something of a mascot, these days. Flandry’s own ‘Mr. Chips,’ if you like. So I live in Benders as a supplemental House Master, and tutor boys who need help in Latin and Greek, not that there are so many who learn the classic languages these days. Between one thing and another, I get by—and continue to shape the minds of future leaders.”

Lestrade grunted polite approval, privately thinking it sounded to him like the old coot was managing a right good scam on the school. Room, board, extra work no doubt paid for on an hourly basis, extra pension money from former students? He wished he could be so lucky.

Or not. Not if it meant puttering around this old place playing Mr. Chips and smirking into his scotch.

In the meantime he’d managed to sort through a very rough timeline in his head. “So,” he said, curious, “Did you teach Mycroft, too? Or had he been sent away to school before you began home-schooling Sherlock?”

The old man gave a sudden high, gleeful little cackle, and downed a full shot of scotch—which he promptly topped up from the hidden bottle in the wall niche. “Good God! Mike! I forgot about him entirely. But one does. One always did. The original invisible child, I swear.” He shook his head, ruefully. “People think genius must be interesting—but, there it is. Mike was dull as ditchwater. Sometimes I even wondered if Mummy remembered him, in spite of her beloved monologue on his ill-timed conception and agonizingly long birth.”

Lestrade fought not to choke on his scotch. “Ill-timed?”

Sextant sniggered. “Oh, not illegitimate. Not even born rather too early in a marriage for true respectability. No. As near as I was ever able to determine, either the birth control failed or the Mister and Missus got a bit reckless in the early days of their marriage, and lo and behold they were blessed with a most unwelcome visit from the stork. Years before Mummy had apparently intended to take up child-rearing. Which, of course, is why she didn’t…”

“I had understood her to have left her profession specifically to raise children,” Lestrade said, frowning.

Sextant gave that unpleasant, too-knowing giggle again. “Is that how they tell it, now?” he asked, with malice dripping. “No, no. She was still teaching when I came onboard. I was…what? I think their fifth tutor? Sixth? One of Mummy’s graduate students, I was at the time.” His eyes narrowed. “Not that it lasted. Perhaps I shouldn’t have got on so well with Will.”

“Sherlock.”

“Ah, yes. Sherlock.” He sniffed, and something cold flashed in his eyes. “She was working on what was expected to be her great opus, of course. ‘Dynamics of Combustion.’ Cutting edge.” 

The hair on Lestrade’s nape rose. There was something in the old man’s words, his inflections, his body language, that set off every old copper’s instinct Lestrade had. In other circumstances he’d have called down to headquarters and arranged for some constables to start looking for a concealed body. As it was, he paused, and armored himself in all his years of skill and attention. He might not be Sherlock—but he wasn’t a fool. Something stank, and if it wasn’t a dead body, it was something equally corrupt.

“So Mummy wasn’t all she was cracked up to be?”  he asked, voice neutral.

One corner of the man’s mouth flicked up. “Apparently not,” he said, smug and satisfied. “She’d been expected to win the DeFreest Award for advances in mathematics that year, you know—the year she published. Instead they held the award back, announcing there was no work worthy of their notice.”

“Mmmmm.” Lestrade said—willing, all of a sudden, to swear that Sextant in some way had contributed to that conclusion. “Must have taken it pretty hard.”

“Good heavens, how would I know,” Sextant purred. “I wasn’t her graduate student by then, was I? And a mere tutor knows very little about his students’ parents.”

Oh, yes, Lestrade thought. A story here. “You still taught the boys, though?”

Sextant sniffed. “Will. I taught Will.”

“Sherlock. Not Mycroft?”

“One didn’t teach Mycroft.” Dark eyes went still darker with resentment. “One handed him assignments and leapt smartly out of his way, pulling one’s fingers back lest he snap them off in his hurry. One didn’t hope for more. Frankly, the only time he was even remotely interesting was when he tried to engage with Will. The number of times I had to separate the boys! And Will so smart in his own right—I wasn’t about to have that colorless little pudding-gut make the boy over to be like him.” 

“Most people quite like a quiet student who studies and doesn’t get into trouble,” Lestrade said, mildly.

Sextant sniffed. “Milquetoast. That was Mike. Bread and butter. Rice pudding. Booooooooring.”

Lestrade felt the shiver—bone deep. He knew that inflection, he thought. Long, musical tones drawn out like the cry of an offended goose. “So—you worked to keep the two boys apart,” he asked. “Didn’t his parents object?”

Sextant grinned, merrily. “No, no—not after I had a few words with them,” he said. “After all—Will was so much more what Mummy had intended from the beginning. Such a lively mind! Such quaint, funny thoughts! So individual! Independent! She could see instantly that a conformist like Mike could be the ruining of Will. And she was getting ready to leave academe herself, by then. Mike had never needed her, after all. Will, though, needed his Mummy.”

Lestrade felt a headache coming on. “If she was leaving off teaching and research,” he said, “then why did she send Sherlock away to school?”

Sextant scowled. “Oh, don’t blame Mummy for that,” he said. “That impossible man she was married to had his say on that.” He shrugged. “There was a departmental party,” he said. “And an incident with some of the faculty children. Something about a duck pond, and Will, and then Mike of course had to show off and ‘rescue’ his little brother.” He shot back another round of scotch. “As though Will couldn’t have won them over given enough time.”

“Uh-huh.” Lestrade made himself stop for a second, recalibrating his voice. That last bit had been far too disbelieving… “But his father thought…”

“That perhaps both boys would benefit from some outside contacts. So Mycroft was sent direct to Harrow, and Sherlock went here.”

“And a year later Mummy managed to get you a job?”

Sextant’s mouth primped up in a way that reminded Lestrade of any number of informers he’d dealt with…men and women willing to sell their mates out for a quid, or for a deal with the prosecution, or just because they liked the hidden power of secret whispers in coppers’ ears. “Oh, no,” he said, sweetly. “By then I hardly saw Mrs. Holmes at all. I gained the position on my own—though it did help that young Will let me know he was having problems that I might profitably help with.”

“So you got a year out of him? No more?”

Sextant shrugged. “We agreed coincidence could only account for my presence at one of his schools,” he said. “And he was a brilliant boy. By then I daresay I’d taught him all I could.”

Lestrade, mulling over what he’d just heard, was actually happy when the little man made his excuses and disappeared into the throng. There was something unclean about him, in Lestrade’s opinion…

A meddler, he thought. A game-player. He wondered how much Jacob Sextant had fiddled and diddled in his years teaching Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes…though it was evident that Sextant hadn’t given much of a damn about Mike. 

He wondered if anyone had ever given much of a damn about Mike… The story Sextant told seemed right, somehow—a good boy born into a family that didn’t really want him. Not then. And…not as he was. A mother who always would respond more to a rampant, loud individualist like Sherlock. Parents, by default, tried to teach their children to be good, and reserved, and well-mannered. Plenty failed, accidentally reinforcing negatives more effectively than positives, or being blessed with children whose capacity for tantrum exceeded their parents’ capacity to resist tantrums. But—what if you were a parent who always would respond more powerfully to the loud child, who accidentally taught the first, oldest child to be quiet?

Invisible Mycroft?

Poor lad, he thought.

He didn’t know he was, perhaps, the only person in the entire world who ever thought of Mycroft as a “lad,” or who ever had done so. It didn’t quite occur to him. But for all his love of Sherlock, there was something about the older brother that worried him, and picked at his hidden tenderness.

Somewhere on the other side of the room Sherlock was in high dudgeon….Sherlock’s specialty. The arrogant, insulting tones carried across the rumble of the reception hall, cutting through the clink of glasses and murmur of people attempting vanilla small talk. Lestrade eased to the back of the space, to a vast leaded bay window decorated with stained glass coat of arms and the signs of Masonry. Hidden knowledge, presumably to be passed to eager young minds.

There was a low dais set into the bay, and once up Lestrade could survey the room more effectively. Sherlock was over at the farther refreshment table, a cup of punch in one hand, John at his elbow—and that weasely little man Sextant actually tucked under one arm. Lestrade grimmaced. He’d  hoped that Sextant’s suggestions of closeness to Sherlock had been no more than vanity and boasting, but in seconds Lestrade could see that Sherlock was defending the man from social jabs—including, to his dismay, something John apparently muttered. Whoever Sextant was to Sherlock, he was important enough to challenge even John’s standing.

Lestrade didn’t get to ask about it that night—though he watched the men throughout the remainder of the evening. When he did get a chance to talk to Sherlock the next day, he didn’t get far.

“Of course I know him,” Sherlock snapped. “He was my tutor for three years, and a teacher at Flandry’s for another. And we’ve corresponded most of my life.” He gave Lestrade a hard look. “I doubt I’d have survived to adulthood without Sextant. He taught me to ignore the sheep—to value myself properly.”

Lestrade bit back a comment to the effect that this explained far too much. Instead he said, “How did he get on with your parents?”

Sherlock studied him, pale eyes suddenly flat and emotionless. Then he gave a patently insincere smirk. “He was a good employee,” he said. “Mummy never had a complaint to make.”

“And your Father?”

“Father left those decisions to Mummy.”

Lestrade knew, then, that Sherlock wasn’t saying more. He also knew that there was more to tell. Much more.

He brooded over it for days, trying to determine how to learn more. He considered getting back in contact with Sextant. The idea gave him the shivers…and worried him. It was too obvious. Sherlock would find out, if only because Sextant was the kind of man who’d be sure to tell him. He considered talking to Sherlock and Mycroft’s parents—but he’d only met them briefly on occasion. Usually over a hospital bed—hardly circumstances that would recommend him, in spite of the fact that it was often only his effort to get Sherlock into that bed that had saved the other man’s life. Still, he didn’t see the two opening up to him. And Mycroft? He knew the man “well,” for a very professional value of the word…but hardly at all on a personal level. 

Running out of other ideas, he risked exceeding his professional authority by contacting first the current Head of Flandry’s, and then the former Head, suggesting he was doing “peripheral investigation” that slightly pertained to Sherlock and to Sextant. He didn’t like the answers that he received. The current Head was direct, though he spoke in a low voice even in the privacy of his own office.

“Sextant’s a chess master,” he said, softly. “My predecessor warned me, but I couldn’t quite believe it. Such a harmless little man! But he’s not.” The slim, tall man, almost the epitome of English elegance, closed his eyes, then, and sighed. “He’s a devil. Fortunately he’s a devil who’s content to maintain what he has, rather than extend his grasp. But he’s a talented little manipulator, with no more conscience than a polecat. And you can’t pin anything on him. Twenty years and more he’s been tying boys to him. The smart ones. The aggrieved ones. The ones who are going to be powers, someday—but who are never going to be popular, and who are never, never going to get over being pissed about it.”

“Sexual?” Lestrade asked, warily.

“I wish it were,” the Head hissed. Then, seeing Lestrade’s shocked dismay, he shook his head, wearily. “You don’t understand. If he were doing anything sexual, I could pin him for it. I might not even need to—a strong basis for assumption would be enough. But he knows better. Even if he’s…that way…he’s made sure he never uses any of our boys like that. No. He…mentors them.”

“Tha’s a good thing, yeah?” Lestrade asked, using his best clueless bloke voice, even as the picture began to come into focus.

“No,” the Head growled. “He brings out the worst in them. And you can’t do anything about it—he’s only ‘teaching them to be proud of their own attributes.’ But they come away righteous with their own damned social failings. Smug about their fucking…sorry….sorry.” He paused, and Lestrade could suddenly see in the frustrated, furious man the sort of person who hid a decent bottle of scotch in a hidden niche in a public reception hall: someone tired, an bright, and nearly at the end of his rope. “Sorry, but he brings out the vulgar side of my vocabulary. It’s just—he turns them all into Holmes, that loud, smug, rude, aggressive little pillock.”

“Don’t like Sherlock much?”

The man shrugged. “I don’t think Mr. Holmes is what I want my school producing as a common thing,” he murmured. “And as long as Sextant survives here it will be common. And thanks to his grateful boys, he’ll be here until he drops dead or takes over the EU, whichever comes first.”

“You say it like the second is an option.”

“You don’t know some of Sextant’s boys,” the man said, voice grim. “Prime Ministers. Cabinet members. Key consultants. Foreign Office, including secret service. I suppose we’re lucky that so far he’s limited his ambition to the occasional vote to withdraw aid from ‘the commonplace’ man on the street. He seems largely happy enough to sit in his lair on campus, and tend to his network of Old Boys.” He stared blankly at his desk, then, at last saying only, “Well. I’m planning on moving on, soon. He’ll be someone else’s problem then.” After which he’d walked Lestrade to the door of the office, and suggested that the former Head might offer something more useful.

“Oh, a veritable weasel,” the old man had said, when Lestrade contacted him. He had a merry voice over the phone. “Do come by and I’ll tell all, Inspector! A pleasure!”

So Lestrade had toddled on over to the little terraced house with geraniums in the window box and a neat little garden in back, and had drunk cold Carlsen’s as the former Head had poured out wicked, gleeful, perceptive gossip going back decades.

“He was a monster,” the Head assured him. “Unfortunately, there are uses for monsters. So many of the boys were never going to be anything but monsters themselves, you see. Will, for example—Sherlock, as he calls himself now. I suspect he was a monster long before Sextant even met him. Spoiled, petted, pampered. For some reason the favored son, though from the little I could see of the elder brother it never made much sense to me. But some people just don’t know what to do with the quiet, dutiful ones who fail to provide an entertaining circus for the parents to clown around with. But Sherlock was never going to be anything but a monster. The real question was whether he could be induced to be a useful monster, and it takes a wicked, devious mentor like Sextant to provide reasons that make sense to a self-centered little brat like Will. Sextant showed him how being of use might prove to his advantage. It’s all that got the boy through school, and out of uni with a degree. The conviction that someday he’d be admired as a special, special snowflake. Sextant’s boys all came away with that—and with a rage at anyone who challenged the delusion.”

He stopped, then, and frowned. “I think in the end that’s what went wrong between Will—Sherlock—and the older boy, you know,” he said. “I didn’t know the older well—visiting days, mainly. But I did keep track of young Will. He worried me—the first of Sextant’s monsters. My first data point. I’m fairly sure the older boy attempted to give young Will a more objective understanding of his place in the world. I doubt he will ever be forgiven for it.”

“At least the man’s not dangerous,” Lestrade said, though his own gut kept insisting Sextant was very dangerous indeed, not least for having managed to maintain some hold over Sherlock over all the decades since he’d taught him.

“Oh, he’s dangerous, all right,” the former Head said. He was short, and stout, and pink-cheeked, with vast, bushy white eyebrows. He looked like a slightly wild and wrathful Santa—one who knows which children deserve merely coal in their stockings, and which deserve to be dragged away by the Krampus. Lestrade had the feeling that Sherlock would be rather lucky to be given coal—and that Sextant was fated for the Krampus’ bag. “He’s a devil…”

“Mmmm?” Lestrade let the question hang on the air.

“Oh, nothing I can prove,” the man said, frowning. Then… “But…I kept track, you see. Of Will and his family. Of Sextant…” He pondered, silent, and Lestrade waited. At last he drew a deep breath. “You know Sextant was once one of Mrs. Holmes’ graduate students? She hired him to do extra work with her sons as a way of supporting his finances while he worked on a degree?”

“Mmmm?”

“Yes. Well. I was talking to another mathematician from her department, once. Years ago.” He sighed. “Did you know she was a genius? Brilliant, apparently. Simply brilliant.”

“I’ve heard different things,” Lestrade said. “Mainly that she left off maths to play mum.”

“Not exactly,” the Head said. “It was one of those vicious, unspoken things. She’d produced a brilliant book—broke boundaries in chaos theory, apparently. Cutting edge. But then…” He drummed his fingers restlessly on the desk. “I’ve heard different versions of this. You need to know this. But this is the one I believe—the one I’ve patched together from pieces from different people, who knew Sextant and Mrs. Holmes in different contexts. Apparently he resented her position as his advisor—he was a genius in his own right, and in those days, well—I must admit, quite a lot of people found it improbable that she was actually better than her clever young grad student. Those were the days when we were all about maths prodigies, who were all men, and all blossomed in their teens and burned out by their late twenties. Statistics, don’t you know. There were plenty of people who found it unlikely that she was as smart as she seemed to be—or that she could possibly be smarter than Sextant.”

Lestrade grunted, and sucked down more cold Carlsen’s, letting the old Head’s witness fall into place.

“Sextant—apparently he was one of the people who couldn’t believe it. I know one of his old roommates had a story about a tantrum he threw after she picked apart some of his doctoral work.” The older man stood, wandered to his refrigerator, and retrieved two more beers, popping the caps and handing Lestrade a new one without asking. “Another told me about Sextant claiming once that Mrs. Holmes stole his work for her book.” He looked at Lestrade, eyes too knowing. “I know one thing for certain—Sextant spread a lot of very, very unpleasant rumors about Mrs. Holmes over the years. He’s almost certainly the source of concern over her book. I’m told she lost a major award because he sent letters and ‘proofs’ that she was stealing a younger, ‘real’ genius’ work.”

Lestrade frowned. “I can’t imagine she’d forgive him for that,” he said, warily.

“I am not sure she ever knew—not sure she even knew why she lost the award. Even then it was the sort of thing that people cared about enormously, believed with superstitious passion—and dared not risk making public. People didn’t want to believe the pretty blonde woman was a maths genius. Sextant gave them excuses not to.”

Lestrade grunted, and played it through in his mind. He thought back to his days as a young copper, when women's rights and racism were really just beginning to be challenged. He wondered what it would have taken to smear an ambitious, talented young woman, or black, or gay cop…especially one who wasn’t particularly skilled at social games.

“That’s ugly,” he said.

“Sextant is ugly,” the old Head said, considering the bubbles floating up in his beer. “He’s a vile, nasty man. We’re very lucky his reach has never gone much further than that.”

Lestrade could only agree.

The next time he met Sherlock, he pushed a bit harder, determined to try to understand. “I’ve heard something about your former teacher, Sextant,” he said. “There were apparently rumors at one time that your mother was stealing work from him for her book.”

Sherlock smirked. “Good lie, wasn’t it?” he said. “Sextant was always very clever.”

Lestrade blinked. “Wha’… You knew?”

“We planned it together,” Sherlock said, seeming quite oblivious to the weight of his narrative. “I was tired of Mummy working. And they were going to make me go to school. I was worried once I was gone Mummy would just…forget me. Like she forgot Mycroft when she was busy and he was working.”

“Ah,” Lestrade said, trying to imagine the young, angelic child with no conscience and infinite need for attention. “So….if you were going to be gone, you had to make sure you were still going to be the biggest thing in your Mummy’s world?”

Sherlock leaned back in his chair, sprawled his legs out, and smirked, eyes closed. It was all the answer he was giving. It was all the answer Lestrade needed.

The copper shook his head. Amoral, he thought. Kids are amoral—and Sherlock’s super-amoral. Always has been. But….

“What if she’d found out?” he said. “That could have ruined everything.”

“Oh, that’s how Sextant was cleverest,” Sherlock said, eyes still shut. The smile he gave then was almost blissful. “I told her, you see. Just before he was hired by Flandry’s. I told her how worried I’d been, and that Mr. Sextant had talked with me, and we’d worked out a way to make sure Mummy decided to leave school and make me her real job. How I couldn’t have gone at all if she wasn’t there, waiting to help if I needed it.” His eyes flew open, then, and he cocked his head up, meeting Lestrade’s eyes. “She was so happy to know why it all happened, and that it was because I needed her.” His tone hit a compromise point between mocking and sincere. 

Lestrade suspected the compromise was accurate. Sherlock—child Sherlock—had needed a mother who’d put him first. He still needed to be the center of his own universe. In the end that was what he loved about John Watson: a worshipper as much as a friend. Blind acceptance and riveted attention…

It still set prickles up his back. Sextant really was a genius. To play a game so deep, and so manipulative, that he destroyed a rival’s career, boxed her into a small, domestic life, turned her son himself into a traitor against her—and set it all up so she forgave and thanked them for it. It made him more than a little sick. So much so that the next time he had a meeting with Mycroft, he dared bring it up.

“I thought you ought to know,” he said when he was done explaining what he’d discovered. “I…the man’s upsetting. And he’s not a good influence. Not on Sherlock, and not on any of his other boys.”

Mycroft met his eyes across the desk. His long fingers stroked the edge of his laptop keyboard. He sat, openly thinking. Lestrade waited.

“I knew,” Mycroft said, finally, his voice soft.

Lestrade scowled. “And you didn’t do anything?”

“I’ve done what I can, over the years,” Mycroft said. He looked down at his hands. “I still consider having him killed,” he said, softly. “He’s a dangerous man, and he loves to play. But I’d rather know he’s still in place, still providing an anchor to all those other nasty, clever boys. And…” He sighed, then. After a moment he shrugged. “You see, I’m handicapped. I have morals. My role permits me to kill. My morals demand I do so only when I can see no other option.”

“So—because he’s a small fish playing petty games, he’s off the hook?”

“He’s not a small fish,” Mycroft murmured. “Not small at all.”

“Limited, then,” Lestrade countered.

“Only because I limit him. And because…” Mycroft smiled, ruefully. “I’m invisible, you see. They don’t notice me, and even when they do, they don’t actually see me. Not even Sextant. I’ve been checking his wilder moves for decades now.” He closed his laptop with a snick, and looked at Lestrade—cold, calm, considering. After a moment he said. “The last time I had to act in any large sense, I had to get Sherlock involved. Sextant had drafted…acolytes, I suppose you might call them. Followers. I didn’t dare let Sherlock know the original source, though. I was afraid he’d side with Sextant.” He snorted, softly. “Of course, I think Sextant was just as afraid he’d side with me, in the end, or he would have let the secret slip.”

Lestrade felt his mouth go dry. “What?” Mycroft studied him, waiting. Lestrade shook his head, unwilling to risk the guess that had exploded into his brain.  “No, Mike—tell me.”

Mycroft looked away. “Jacob is another name for James,” he said, softly. “And Moriarty means ‘navigator.’”

For whom a sextant was a critical tool…

“Shit,” Lestrade whispered. “Bloody fucking hell.”

Mycroft shrugged. “Yes. Well.”

Lestrade scowled at him. “They’re still friends,” he said.

“Oh, not friends,” Mycroft countered. “But they see themselves in each other.”

Lestrade grimaced. “Sherlock’s…better than that.”

“Yes. Because of John. Because of you. Because of Mrs. Hudson and Miss Hooper.”

“Because of you, too.”

Mycroft shrugged yet again. “Perhaps. Never enough to count on, though.”

Lestrade contemplated. After a time he said. “You should kill him anyway.”

Mycroft gave a little chuckle. “Sherlock?”

“No, you prat. Sextant.”

“And set all those wicked lost boys free?”

“I doubt there’s a one clever enough to take Sextant’s place,” Lestrade growled.

“Perhaps not. But we’ve already got one righteous murder in the family. Two seems excessive.” 

Lestrade grunted, but let it go.

But he had his own contacts, and his own morals, and his own superiors at MI5. He wasn’t surprised to find himself called up on a black ops assignment a month after he made a private report.

Sherlock openly mourned, flouncing around and swearing he’d “prove” the accidental death of Jacob Sextant had been murder. It didn’t happen, though—one of the few times Lestrade ever beat Sherlock at his own game outright. 

Mycroft never mentioned it at all. And, yet, he took the older man out for a pint the week of Sextant’s death, and when Lestrade asked why, he said, “Consider it thanks for services rendered.”

And that was the end of Jacob Sextant.

 

 

 


End file.
